I came across this page of your site
http://boston.conman.org/2004/11 and noticed that you are linking to
http://www.va.gov/opa/vetsday and other resources for servicemen and
women. I wanted to thank you for supporting veterans and active
military. This is a mission I have been deeply involved in as well.
If I may have just a moment of your time, I wanted to talk to you
about a serious health struggle among veterans - and also suggest an
addition to your page.

[ … ]

Thank you,

Ashley Knowles

Outreach Coordinator

outreach@advocatesforhealth.org

It's only because today is such a great day that this spam email caught my eye.
I know this is a rhetorical question to Ashley but … did you even bother to read the post in question?
Did you even bother to read the page you linked to to see if it's relevant to your organization?

No?
Is that because you just did a search for “Vererans Day” and spammed every site that linked to that page?
Yes?
Do you realize you have two completely different email addresses?
No?
Is that because you don't care?

Gaaaah!

Update just two hours later …

From

"Ashley Knowles" <outreach@advocatesforhealth.org>

To

"sean" <sean@conman.org>

Subject

Correction - Thank You for Supporting Veterans on boston.conman.org

Date

Wed, 2 Mar 2016 14:15:23 -0800

Hello,

*I'm resending this because my recent e-mail was mistakenly sent through a colleagues account. Apologies if you have received two.

I came across this page of your site
http://boston.conman.org/2004/11 and noticed that you are linking …

As initially designed,
“Project: Sippy-Cup” was only to be used in North America.
It was also designed such that the MDNs (aka “phone number”—the telephony industry has its fair share of TLAs)
would be found in a particular format—a TEL URI.
And because we only support numbers in North America,
they follow the NANP (this is an example of an ETLA) format for numbers.

Of course,
that's the theory.
In practice,
we are dealing with the Monopolistic Phone Company and well … they don't have to care.
So it was with that in mind that I was told to look for MDNs in
SIPURIs.
Okay,
so find a 10-digit number in a TEL or SIPURI.
The design specification said that the MDN in the TEL URI would have a leading “+1” and then the MDN.
Since SIPURIs were a complete afterthought
I figured that any MDNs in a SIPURI would also follow the same format,
a leading “+1” and the MDN.

So in mid-January,
I get a report that “Project: Sippy-Cup” is failing to handle non-NANPMDNs.

But because it was in production (seriously,
why did no one tell me?) updates are … complicated.
Many meetings need to be held to determine if we need a MOP,
even more meetings to determine what to MOP,
which what to MOP,
when to MOP,
who needs to MOP,
where to MOP,
and why to MOP.

One month later,
last night (or rather, very early this morning)
to be precise,
we could install the fix.

An hour and a half in
(for some reason the term “Charlie Foxtrot” comes to mind since we seem to have forgotten to discuss “how to MOP”—I'll
skip the “Project: Sippy-Cup” production setup house-of-card details due to the OEM testing that is still on-going)
I made the call to abort and roll back.
The code I had written was mis-identifying
NANPMDNs as non-NANPMDNs
because some codepath somewhere else was failing to prefix the
MDNs in
SIPURIs with a “+1” in some cases.

Obligatory Miscellaneous

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go
ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or
entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent
links to that entry only. The format for the links are
simple: Start with the base link for this site: http://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are
interested in, say 2000/08/01,
so that would make the final URL:

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's
intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the
page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in
using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If
you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that
important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name,
symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a
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